Present/past/future: searching for the spirit of the Blitz club

When I blogged about the new romantics last year, I made a mental note to pop down to the location of the Blitz club sometime. Why I'd want to do that, as such, I'm not quite sure. Was it some kind of morbid curiosity? Actually, it was probably just the photo on Wikipedia, a photo which appears to have been subject to a little computerised stylisation. This one: 

It looks kind of interesting, no? Anyway, earlier this week I did indeed go down to Great Queen Street, off Kingsway near Holborn tube (it's not really Covent Garden). And here's what the location of Steve Strange and Rusty Egan's former hangout looks like now: 

The Blitz: gone but not forgotten (not quite)

Hmm, quite miserable. Meanwhile, here's the building (part of it) back in its glory days, with Strange & co lining up rather moodily for a group photo out on the pavement:

Steve Strange and his Blitz bouncers (pic Sheila Rock)

Spot the difference. To state the obvious, the main difference is the one between a functioning building - a venue, a hangout, a scene - and a dank, forbidding-looking place with "Danger Asbestos! Keep out!" signs plastered over its blank frontage. Closed-up buildings can be strangely appealing, slightly mysterious even. But here, a few doors in from traffic-strewn Kingsway and passed by without a glance by tourists who've accidentally strayed too far from Soho, 4 Great Queen Street is quite forlorn but also rather ordinary and er, un-romantic. You might even say that Barry Adamson in the photo above seems to foresee how it'll all end up - an ignominious fate. But no. The building of course doesn't matter, not in the slightest. The other day I wasn't making a "pilgrimage" (as the tabloids/BBC tend to say) to the site, not at all. In all likelihood, the building is now probably owned by a company registered in somewhere like the British Virgin Islands, part of a wider property portfolio being milked for maximum profit. Capitalistic property development being what it is, I'm tempted to say: let them do their worst. Knock it down, turn it into a "boutique hotel", a bubble tea outlet, whatever. But whatever they do, they should take down this ghastly plaque high up on the wall:

A plague on plaques: 4 Great Queen Street's obligatory marker

Fuck, man, does every musical movement have to end up with one of these? A tombstone for a once-vibrant scene? In his excellent essay on the gentrification of Spitalfields, the historian Raphael Samuel talks about the "pathos of conservation", in particular railing against the attempt to turn a messy, former Jewish enclave in the vicinity of the old vegetable market in east London into a sort of Georgian heritage park, all identikit houses with fake wooden shutters and over-preserved interiors. These music heritage plaques have a similar pathos, though if anything they're even worse. In the case of this Spandau Ballet one, it's located so high on the wall that most people will fail to see it - which is at least vaguely amusing. Even I didn't immediately notice the plaque and er, I went down to Holborn specifically to look at the building. In my view the new romantic scene didn't produce very much noteworthy music, but it was undoubtedly an extremely important post-punk cultural moment. Its mix of outré clothing, styling and adoption of Bowie/Kraftwerk-based electronic music definitely mattered. It doesn't deserve this tawdry little plaque, but then neither does it deserve - or need - any kind of physical memorialisation. Accordingly, it's obviously a mistake to seek the "spirit" of a musical scene in a specific location (compare The Cavern) and checking out 4 Great Queen Street merely confirmed what I already knew. As it happens, it seems that the building has been closed up since the beginning of Covid, with a club called The Red Rooms coming to a shuddering halt in March 2020 (you can still see an old neon lighting tube spelling out "The Red Rooms" above the doorway). Its last event, on 29 February 2020, was a DJ night headed up by someone called Hutch (one half of the charmingly-named Hoxton Whores apparently): 

Present/past/future. Will the Hutch DJ nights ever end up with their own memorial plaque ("Hutch, one half of Hoxton Whores, DJ-ed here")? If I was him, though, I'd say, "No plaques for me, thanks". Music is already awash with heritagisation of all kinds - from punk walking tours to 50th anniversary box sets - and overall I was fairly satisfied with my distinctly low-key Bank Holiday visit to the location of the former Blitz club. In the Sheila Rock photograph (mis-captioned in the Guardian, by the way, as being from 1978), there are two-thirds of Magazine in the Visage ensemble arranged for the pic: Barry Adamson, Dave Formula and John McGeogh. I was going to end this post with a Visage song, but instead it'll have to be a Magazine tune. Having listened to two Visage albums (Visage and The Anvil) during the course of bashing out these vital thoughts on the old Blitz club building, the only genuinely good song I heard was the over-familiar Fade To Grey. It reinforces my point that the new romantics were strong on clothes, club atmospherics and gender fluidity, but weak on ... creating decent music. RIP the Blitz, your spirit ("the Blitz spirit") lives on. Maybe ...